IT is not to be gainsaid that Tom Bradshaw heard of the flight of Mary Ellen with relief. “I don’t know if I’m a doubting Thomas: I’m sure I’m a doubting Quixote,” had been his thought lately when he remitted Walter his half share of her expenses. He was very certain now that he was the one good Bradshaw, and whatever backward glances Walter might cast Tom closed the account of Mary Ellen with finality. He would neither see nor hear that young woman again. “I blame myself,” he wrote to Walter. “She is a Bradshaw and I ought to have stopped your foolishness instead of going shares in it. I’ll stop it now, though, and when you write of going to the police I say I won’t have it. Forget her. (If it comes to police, owd lad, what price yon pair of white-slaving procurers, thee and me?). This man Chown that you say you suspect. I’ve made enquiries and there’s nothing the matter with Chown. And if he looted her from us, who looted first? It’s a blow to you, but honestly, Walter, better sooner than later and she would have cut and run when it suited her. She’s a Bradshaw. Bar me, Bradshaws are muck.” Meanwhile, the organizer of victory was making first tactical moves in his Mary Ellen campaign. He made them in a spacious room whose admirable furniture suggested that this was the Holy of Holies of some eminent dealer in antiques until one noticed the large, floridly signed photographs on the walls and the parti-colored advertising sheet which announced all West End attractions and contradicted crudely the Persian rugs on the floor: the private office of Mr. Hubert Rossiter, that elderly miracle of youthful dapperness whose queer high-stepping walk suggested, especially when he rehearsed a crowd of chorus-girls, nothing so much as a bantam-cock. He had developed, to an extraordinary degree, the knack of knowing what the public wanted and of fitting together, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, incongruous parts that merged under his touch into the ordered whole of a popular entertainment. He wasn’t, artistically, without scruple, but Hubert Rossiter with his two sweetstuff shops in town and his several touring companies in the country was a prophet of theatrical standardization: a safe man, with no highbrow pretensions about him, never short of other people’s money for the financing of his productions. Chown had been called into the Presence about a matter which might have caused friction on any other day. Today, Chown wanted something of Rossiter and the threatening clouds dissolved in smiling sunshine. That affair settled, Chown took up his hat, then stopped. “By the way, Hubert,” he said, “whom would you say is the toughest stage manager you’ve got on tour?” “There’s Darley. Darley doesn’t wear kid gloves. He’s out with ‘The Little Viennese.’ I’m told they call that company ‘The Little Ease.’” “Just what I’m looking for. That’s the South tour, isn’t it?” asked Chown who did not want Mary Ellen to visit Staithley. “Yes.”